With this being my fourth year as a MacCompanion
columnist, I now bring you my fourth annual report on Apple's Worldwide Developer
Conference. For those who do not already know, Apple hosts this
week-long conference about this time every year, preparing developers for the
newest technologies that are expected in the near future. In recent years, the conference
attendance size has continued to grow, with tickets completely selling out
these past two years. (Actually,
WWDC '07 was also technically sold out, although this was compensated for by
Apple cutting back on the number of its own employees from attending.)
Much of the material covered in WWDC is covered
by a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), meaning that I can speak about those
matters only to others who are under NDA. However, there is a great deal of material that is available to the general
public. This includes the WWDC
keynote address, which has been made available by Apple for viewing. It can also be viewed on YouTube.
Other material not included in the keynote may also be outside
Apple's NDA if it is publicly released. An example of this is OpenCL, a
new Apple technology which is released as an open industry standard. Finally, there are technologies owned
or used by Apple, but are part of the public domain. Two examples of these are gcc and
CUPS, both critical to Mac OS X, but are free for all
to view.
New
Operating Systems
The two central topics for this year's conference
was Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and iPhone OS
3.0. Unlike most of the Mac OS X upgrades in
recent years, 10.6 will not see major new features or user interface overhauls
(despite the false rumor of a new interface named Marble predicted in various
newsgroups). The goal
for 10.6 was performance improvements and better developer tools for creating
next generation products. For this
reason, Apple has modified its usual $129 upgrade path for new versions of Mac
OS X, and will be charging only $29 to current Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users. 10.6 is an Intel-only OS, and is
expected to be available in September. Apple had originally hoped to release 10.6 at WWDC '09, but inevitable
delays cause them to announce in May that conference attendees would instead
receive a "final developer preview release". On the day of the conference
keynote, the term final was
replaced with near final,
indicating that there will be (at least) one more prerelease of 10.6 between this and its
commercial release in September. Next month I will devote a column specifically to the upcoming Snow
Leopard OS, but this month I will write about the conference itself.
As it was with last year, the iPhone was a
huge part of this year's conference as well. And this is not surprising considering the number of iPhone and iPod
Touches that have been sold. At
the keynote, it was mentioned that the OS X installed base has tripled due to these devices. Consider: many of us Macintosh fans have been around for 20
years, being very loyal and proud supporters of the platform. But now there are now two
iPhone/iPod Touch users for every one Mac user. This all in just two years.
Wow.
I
must admit, I am not sure what to think about that. We Mac developers have just been instantly eclipsed by the
iPhone. We are now in their
shadow, not the other way around ... at least as far as numbers go. And the demographics are different
too. If you walked into a typical
Mac session at this year's WWDC, you would mostly see what you would expect:
predominantly male programmers, mostly in their 40's, most having been Mac
people for two decades. But walk
into an iPhone session, and what do you see? Young people, in their 20's ... and a noticeable number of
young women in the mix. All with
the enthusiasm and excitement about the iPhone that I had about the Mac two
decades ago.
I suddenly found myself feeling a little old.
Not that there's really any reason to feel this
way. After all, both the Mac and
iPhone platforms are variations of OS X. There is significant overlap in the Cocoa API for developing for
both. And let's face it, Mac users
still bring in the revenue, as even the most expensive iPhone is still far
cheaper than the least expensive iMac. But there is this nagging feeling that the present Mac developer
community will soon be giving way to a new generation. Perhaps it's happening already. After all, 60% of this year's attendees
are first timers ... it seems very likely that they are predominantly interested
in the iPhone.
However, it does appears that Mac developers were the ones
willing to do more to attend WWDC. Why do I say that? It came
about from noticing what seemed to be a random fluctuations for final prices in
scalped WWDC tickets on Ebay. One
auction would sell its ticket for $1600 after only 2 bids while another selling
for over $3000 after 47 bids, all in the same day, mere hours apart. I didn't understand this until I saw
the pattern: those with ending prices of less than $2000 had auction titles
like "WWDC 2009 Apple Developer Conference ticket", while the ones selling for more than that
(often much more) had titles like "WWDC Ticket Apple Conference San
Francisco Mac Developer". When the auction title included the
word "Mac" (not
just "Apple"), it
sold on average for $1000 more.
Disappointments
Galore
Although this is my 4th MacCompanion article on
WWDC, it is actually my 12th time in attendance. Sadly, I have watched this conference slowly degrade with
time. In years past, WWDC would
offer great parties, wonderful food, so many giveaways and t-shirts that you
needed to pack an extra suitcase. Today, it has been reduced to a mere shadow of its former self. And WWDC '09 was perhaps the
conference's historic low.
Simply put, WWDC '09 was filled with
disappointments. Some of these
disappointments were not Apple's fault. For example, last minute excitement generated a rumor that Steve Jobs
might make an appearance at the keynote address. Of course he did not. A liver transplant is major surgery, and there would be no way he could
have been there. However, no one
at the time knew about this surgery, so unbridled enthusiasm reigned.
Other
disappointments were due entirely to the scaling back of the conference
amenities. In WWDC's past, one
could get by with evening WWDC snacks for dinner. Three years ago, I dined at Apple's expense each of
the four evening of the conference: Monday was the WWDC Welcome Reception,
Tuesday there was pizza and the like before the Design Awards and Stump the
Experts, Wednesday had more snacks during the Scientific Poster Session and
encore sessions, and of course Thursday was the Apple Party. In 2007 & 2008, they double-upped
the Scientific Poster Session onto Tuesday, making Wednesday an event free
night. This year, they killed off
both the Scientific Poster Session an the long-running WWDC Welcome
Reception. Plus they removed all
the food options Tuesday night. The only evening meal this year was at the Apple Party on Thursday
night.
Not
that the lunches were any great prize. I never thought that the lunches could get worse, but I was wrong. This year, they got rid of soda during
lunch. Three liquid options:
canned sweetened ice tea, canned lemonade, and water. No Coke, no diet soda, nothing. (Although some diet soda showed up in mid-afternoon
sessions.) And the lunches
themselves were these tasteless wrap options. For the first time, I skipped the Apple lunches and ate
out. (It seemed too degrading to
eat terrible food while nearby San Francisco restaurants offered some of the
finest cuisine in the world.)
The
crowds were also pretty bad this year. Bad in the sense that it was overwhelming. Being another sold out conference, I had prepared myself for the lines
being just as long as last year. What I hadn't prepared for was that it was going to be even worse this year! Due to the insistence of the San Francisco Fire Marshall, this year's
attendance numbers could not be appreciably larger than WWDC '08's (even with
Apple time-sharing its engineers better). However, crowding was worsened by Apple's decision to run only sessions 7 at
a time, instead of the usual 8. The SOMA conference room was disbanded,
and so each remaining session could expect to see an (average) increase of 15%
in audience size. Each presentation
session saw long lines of people queueing up.
The
Apple Party ... well, it was okay I guess. It was the best food of the week, but of course that was not
saying much. The sushi was of
course the best, but how excited could I be lining up at the hot dog bar, or
queueing to eat some unremarkable pasta? The band was Cake [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAKE ]. So I am uncool if I admit I've never
heard of them? Yawn. After last year's fantastic appearance
of the Bare Naked Ladies, I
guess it would have taken a lot to impress me.
Bright
Spots
The
high point of the conference was certainly Tuesday night, with the double
booking of the Apple Design Awards and Stump the Experts. ADA is always interesting, in which the best of the best
Macintosh and iPhone applications get to be shown off. There was no single remarkable moment
as there was last year (when John Geleynse stole the show playing Slow Hand on Guitar Hero III), but it was fun nonetheless. However, this year's crowd was so
massive, even the large Presidio auditorium could not hold everyone, so many of
us had to watch the Design Awards in an overflow room.
But
the best of that night (and of the entire conference) was Stump. Host Fred Huxham was in fine form that
night, as usual. However, it was
co-host Mark Harlan who really shined this year. In the past, Mark has sometimes upstaged Fred a little too
much, distracting from the event, but at Stump '09, Mark was absolutely superb. I couldn't get enough of him, he was
great. His interaction with the
audience was absolutely amazing, and his comedic timing was perfect.
The
best point came with an audience question, "What was the worst Mac?",
causing almost the entire expert assemblage to circle and argue over what would
be the right answer. Even a half
hour into the discussion, you could see the experts still hotly debating their
points. Mark described the
question as a "social denial of service attack".
This
was perhaps the best Stump I had ever seen.
Another
very amusing event at this year's conference took place Monday morning while we
were all in line waiting to get into the keynote. As we waited outside, jet-lagged and irritated, a horse
drawn carriage filled with scantily clad girls advertising iPorn.com pulled up
to us. These half naked girls (in
55 degree weather, mind you) came out to show their ... uh ... wares. Most of us had a pretty good laugh
about it (since most of us were males), and the girls were very friendly to us
Mac developers.
Of
course, it's certainly fair to say that the excitement these girls showed was
genuine. I know that they were
paid to be there, but I'm sure they'd have been there anyways. After all, what would a bunch of
bikini-clad 20 year olds prefer more than to flirt with 5,000 out-of-shape,
middle aged computer geeks? Surely
they were there to meet us personally. The porn web site they had printed on their bottoms was completely
beside the point, I'm sure.
(Hey,
it's my article. I can believe
what I want.)
Failed
Logistics
From
a logistical point of view, this year's WWDC was the worst ever (even the iPorn girls couldn't make that
better). There is no close
second. Monday, the opening day of
the conference, was a complete nightmare. Beginning with the keynote, everything went wrong. Although
the keynote began promptly at 10, it took Apple until after 10:30 to get everyone
seated in all the overflow rooms. People were very unhappy having
paid all this money and missed an entire segment of the keynote (I went back
watched the hardware announcements over a streaming channel at lunch.) What makes this inexcusable is that
they had known for six weeks exactly how many people would be in attendance. They sold out their tickets at the end of April, so they had
plenty of time to prepare and let people get to their seats before the
keynote's start.
Moreover, their (apparent) last minute
cancellation of the traditional Monday night WWDC Welcome Reception left a number of us
standing around and confused. Those using their iPhones to see the
conference schedule could figure out what happened, as Monday Night was blanked out
(no mention of a cancellation, just left blank). Those using
computers had problems. If you went to the WWDC Attendee page, you correctly
saw no Monday night event, but if you simply went to the WWDC public page for
Events, it was still listed (and
continues to be as I write this now). A number of us stood around on
the 2nd Floor for a good half hour waiting, until finally Security told us the
hall was closing. Quite bizarre.
Even
more atypical was the rudeness of one Apple conference organizer of whom I
asked this very question. It began
by my asking the security person by the second floor escalator if the Welcome
Reception was still happening. He
didn't know, but he wanted to find out since I was the fourth person to ask him
that. As we were
chatting, I see an Apple rep coming down the escalator from the 3rd floor, so
we ask her. Curtly, she just said
"No.". I asked her if she knew that
it was still advertised on the Apple web site. Without stopping, she said "I don't think so," and
kept walking. I was taken aback by
her rudeness, as Apple reps have always bent over backwards to be helpful. While I stood there with my jaw open,
the security guy says to me, "Pleasant, isn't she?" (I liked this guy.) I had a good chuckle over that. My only regret was that I was too
stunned by her abrupt manner to get a look at her name. Had I done so, I would certainly have
been happy to publicly share it in this column. I know her face though, and if I see her again, I will let
you dear readers know.
Demos were also poorly handled. The last two iPhone demos that were
supposed to climax Scott Forstall's talk simply failed to
work. Despite the claim that everything worked correctly during
rehearsal, the two back-to-back failures were just embarrassing. Demos throughout the conference failed,
as if the presenters just didn't care enough to make sure they worked. I know that can't be the case, but the
continual on-stage bungling just seems inexcusable to me.
It's
as if they off-shored their logistics people or something. 60% of
this year's attendees are first timers at WWDC, and they were not left with a
very favorable impression. I usually
don't call for head rolling for such mistakes, but this year I feel it is
due. All of the Apple employees responsible
for organizing this conference ought to be fired. Period.
Conclusion
So
how do I rate this year's conference? Logistically, it was an F, no
question about it. But the keynote
was an improvement over last year, despite the failed demos and the missing
Steve Jobs, perhaps a C+. The overall amenities I'd have to give a D to, the food another F, but Stump was a
solid A. (The iPorn girls don't get a grade,
since they are considered extra-curricular activity.)
Despite
the good, I still come away from this year's conference as the worst of the 12
WWDC's I have attended. Worse even
than the depressing 1997 conference, in which attendees thought the Mac was
finished. For this reason, I have
to give WWDC '09 the lowest grade yet: a D.
Coming Up Next Month: In
depth analysis on the upcoming Snow Leopard operating system! See you in 30!
To see a list of all
the According to Hoyle columns, visit: http://www.jonhoyle.com/maccompanion
http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/July2009/Columns/AccordingtoHoyle.htm
|
JonHoyle.com Mirror of MacCompanion
